


anyplace, u.s.a.

by sloppybxtch



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Pennywise (IT), Alternate Universe - Road Trip, Eddie Kaspbrak Loves Richie Tozier, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier-centric, Friends to Lovers, Gay Eddie Kaspbrak, Gay Richie Tozier, M/M, Maybe Fall in Love Along the Way, Mutual Pining, Reunions, Richie Tozier Loves Eddie Kaspbrak, Richie and Eddie Take a Road Trip, Slow Burn, The Rituals Are Intricate, because fuck that clown
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-15
Updated: 2020-03-06
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:07:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22742239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sloppybxtch/pseuds/sloppybxtch
Summary: Derry fell away in the rearview, and then the whole of Penobscot county, a blur of violent orange and red, and Richie turned up the volume of the stereo and said, “So, where to, Eds?”“Don’t call me that,” came Eddie’s instinctual response from where he sat in the passenger seat, a brief backslide into childhood, and then he said, “Fucking anywhere. Anywhere at all.”--Or: It's 1999, and for the first time in his life, Richie runs away. Eddie won't let him leave him behind.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak & Richie Tozier, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 25
Kudos: 38





	1. derry

**Author's Note:**

> listening to the song "fast car" by tracy chapman while reading this fic is highly advised

Richie made it twenty-three years into his life without knowing what the hell coolant was, or that a car could run out of it. And he would have loved to go twenty-three more without the first-hand knowledge of just how terrifying it was to drive down the I-95, singing along to his The The tape in the stereo, footloose and fancy-fucking-free, only to feel a stutter beneath his feet as white steam plumed from beneath the hood of his car. Richie knew nothing about automobiles, except for how to drive one in a semi-legal way when the cops were looking, and so naturally his first thought was that his car was a millisecond away from exploding him into little Richie pieces all across the asphalt.

And if he had to die, he really didn’t want to die in fucking Maine.

First, he screamed. Then he realized that screaming didn’t stop oncoming death, it just made it a louder experience, and after a car behind him honked at him Richie was at last able to rub two brain cells together and flash his hazards. He pulled to a shaky stop on the side of the highway, vaulted out of his car, and ran into the trees lining the road, where he could witness any potential explosions from a safe distance. He waited one second. Then two. Then three, then four, and his stupid car was still intact, streaming thin white steam from the seam in its hood, like cigarette smoke trailing from blue-painted lips.

He waited nine more seconds—his lucky number was 13—before slowly approaching his car again. It was a blue 1965 Chevy pickup that Richie’s dad’s friend had sold him back in high school for a suspiciously low price. Richie didn’t care, because it was a car and it was his, and the tape deck was in working order which was all he really needed to know.

But now, maybe this stupid car would kill him. Working tape deck and all. Betrayed by his own.

Richie opened the passenger door, gingerly, like one wrong move could cause the whole thing to go up in flames, and snatched his Nokia from the passenger seat, dug around in the glovebox for the AAA pamphlet his father had stuck in there. Tow-truck. Roadside assistance. A lifeline to get off of the side of the highway.

He powered on the phone, and waited for a signal. The signal never came.

“You’ve got to be _fucking_ kidding me,” Richie groaned, and kicked at the front right tire.

He thought back to what he’d seen in movies—they always popped the hood when smoke was coming out of it, right? It took Richie longer than he’d care to admit to find the release button, since popping the hood was another thing he’d never done in his seven years of being a car owner, and when he walked over to check out the engine, he immediately burned his right hand.

“Motherfucking cocksucking son of a fucking _bitch_ ,” Richie yelped, sucked at his seared thumb. He checked the signal on his Nokia again—still nothing.

With no other options, besides maybe abandoning the Chevy—which was never going to happen—or walking the seven miles or so he still had left to go before reaching civilization—which was abso-fucking-lutely never going to happen—Richie settled back against the driver’s side of his car and waited for a Samaritan to take pity. 

The The were lying to him, he decided as he watched the highway, because this was most certainly _not_ the day his life would surely change. This was the day that he’d walk into traffic, probably, just to give himself something to do that wasn’t leaning against his crappy car in the quiet, with only himself to talk to. He’d never been good company.

The rancid cherry on top of this shit pie was that he was closer to the Derry town limits than he’d been in a decade. Fucking Derry. Every problem Richie had he traced back to that town, a neat chalk line connecting all of his most fucked-up thoughts and experiences backlike the nexus of a spider’s web. Derry’d given him nothing good—except maybe for _those_ friends, who were more than good, actually. Incredible, even. But he hadn’t seen those friends since he’d moved, and after a little back and forth of exchanged letters and long Thursday night telephone calls, Richie had let them fade away in his memory, until they were a collection of bright, sunny summer moments, barely even people.

Fucking Derry.

The problem with standing out here by himself was that Richie was _stuck_ with himself. And Richie wasn’t his own favorite person. He tried playing a game to keep his mind occupied, to come up with stories about the people in the spotty stream of cars that sped by, to come up with Voices for each. Who they were, what they were like, where were they coming from, what they thought about the dumb fuck standing alone beside a busted car with a burnt hand. But his thoughts kept drifting back to who _he_ was, and what _he_ was like, and where _he_ was coming from. None of those were questions Richie wanted to answer.

He thought back to that morning, the haze of leaving. The routine he’d fallen into, slinging sandwiches at the deli downtown, biting back his tongue with every ounce of his concentration to keep conversation short and sweet and _professional_ —that was the ticket, that’s what had gotten Richie let go from one too many miserable minimum wage gigs. He was lonely in a way he’d never been before in his life, even though he saw the same people every day, people who could probably point him out in a crowd and say _hell yeah, Richie’s a shit ton of fun on a night out_ , but people who knew nothing more about him, nothing worth knowing. It was making Richie think that he wasn’t anyone worth knowing in the first place. If maybe jokes and that swirling writhing buzz of never-enough that twitched his fingers and ran his mouth were all he could be.

Things had gone to shit with his parents, but then again, they’d always been shit in some small way. _Our bright boy_ , they’d used to call him, Maggie’s warm, soft hands cupping his smiling face, filling him up with so much light inside he was sure he would burst. When he was a kid, his parents had made up a sort of game they played whenever Richie’s mind would zoom all over the place. “Oh Mags, he’s too fast for us!” Went would say, flashing a smile that mirrored his son’s. They’d make a joke of it, and then it’d turn into a real-life game of tag, with Richie shrieking in delight as his mother and father chased him around the living room, with their chorus of _he’s too fast for us, love, our Richie’s just too fast!_

Those games stopped at around the same time the phrase _our bright boy_ blew out of the Tozier home on some stray breeze, like someone left open a window in the middle of the night and all the love leaked out. It was around 1988, just before the move, when school stopped becoming something he just had to sit through and morphed into something he had to sludge through, a battle he dove into seven times a day, on every hour, with one meager break for lunch in between. A battle he lost, more often than not. When his hyperactivity stopped being a childish quirk and became a dirty word, when the conduct reports stopped informing his parents that he was an energetic boy and started declaring him a “disruptive young man,” a young man who could “make something of himself if he put in the effort,” an over-all fuck up without the excuse of a low IQ.

The counselor back in Castle Rock had told him that once, to his face. Mr. Prichard was a mousy, nasally man, with a bald spot right on the top of his head that made him look like he’d just been broken out of a monastery. “Richard,” he’d begun, in a long-suffering sort of tone that was reserved solely for public school employees. “Your test scores show that you’re clearly very bright. But I just don’t see you putting in any effort. You could be valedictorian, you know, if you actually tried.” Richie didn’t remember exactly what he’d said back, because it was so long ago and also because he was pretty sure all he saw was red, but it had been bad enough to get him in school suspension for two days and a particularly colorful lecture from Wentworth Tozier ready and waiting when he came home.

Because that was the whole shitty thing about it all.

Richie did fucking try. He put in the god damn effort.

But nobody paid attention.

He stopped trying all together when he was eighteen and a half, when he walked out in the middle of his freshman year statistics class and never looked back. His parents hadn’t spoken to him for a week. It barely got better, he took more double shifts, stayed out drinking with acquaintances he could barely stand in order to put as much distance between himself and his home as he could, like the less time he spent there, the less like himself he became, until he could maybe one day morph into a person he could stand.

 _He’s too fast for us_ , his parents used to say. And maybe that’s what happened. Maybe Richie started moving so fast he became invisible.

Maybe that would be better than whatever fucked up life he was living now, where he crawled inside of himself like a turtle in its shell, desperately seeking for a place to hide, a new Voice that sounded absolutely nothing like him at all.

Jesus fucking Christ, nothing like breaking down on the side of the highway to throw a guy into a masturbatory spiral of self-loathing.

He thought of someone then—a small, wide-eyed boy with a spine of steel no matter how often he’d been told otherwise, a boy Richie hadn’t seen in a decade, a boy who had been, in Richie’s eyes, the greatest kid in the entire fucking world.

 _Fuck off with your British guy_ , this wide-eyed boy had said, one sunny summer afternoon when they were thirteen and Richie felt the boyish thrill of growing up, the buzzing excitement at envisioning the future sprawled out before him.

 _Which Voice would you prefer, Sir Spaghedward?_ Richie had responded, knocking into his arms just for the thrill of brushing skin against skin. They were eating ice cream cones, and Richie remembered the sheer force of will it took to not lose his thirteen-year-old mind when the boy asked for a taste of his mint chocolate chip.He’d been about to launch into a Grand Tour of Richie Tozier’s Really Fucking Good Voices, beginning with British Guy and then maybe launching into Pancho Vanilla, even though the feedback on that one was particularly negative, when:

_I prefer yours, asshole. I like your voice best._

And, well, yowza. At thirteen and at twenty-three, Richie’d been floored. No one had ever said anything like that to him before or since, and it’d made him feel absolutely stripped bare, cut open right down the middle with his guts all spilling out, a Richie-sized science class frog pinned down, staring down the sharp edge of a scalpel, and maybe not even minding at all.

He felt suddenly guilty for falling out of contact with his Derry friends, as he pressed his lips to the angry burn on his hand—it’d be sure to blister. He wondered what would have changed if he’d never been dragged away to Castle Rock for his mother’s new gig as a French professor, if he’d insisted on his parents carting him down to Derry every weekend like he’d promised his Losers, if he’d driven himself three years later, in his old-new pickup truck. He wondered if he’d be different if he’d never have let—

“Hey! Need some help?”

Richie nearly jumped out of his skin, and realized two things at once—one: a sensible blue sedan had pulled off onto the shoulder in front of his smoking car, a compact dark-haired man unfurling himself from the driver’s side, and two: he was still sucking on his thumb.

“Fuck, um, yeah man, actually that would be fucking amazing—“ he vaguely remembered his father’s brief obsession with serial killers, with Derry’s unusually high violent crime rate. “I don’t even know what happened, and the signal out here is shit and—“

“What the fuck?”

The man sounded surprised, and now that he was getting closer it was easier for Richie to make out his features. He was slightly shorter than average, skin not quite tanned but nearly there, thick brows set over wide, expressive brown eyes. He looked concerned, and that concern was _so fucking familiar_ , and then he looked surprised, and as those round brown eyes flicked over the length of Richie’s body he inexplicably felt like a dissected frog again, split open on a lab table, smiling at the boy holding the knife, and that’s when he realized—

“Richie?” The other man said around a disbelieving sort of laugh.

“Eddie fucking Kaspbrak?”

“Holy shit.”

“Dude, what the fuck!”

They didn’t hug, and Richie felt the distance between them like it was a living thing. His hand twitched at his side, and he didn’t know what to do so he said, “small world, man! What brings you here?”

Eddie gave him a withering look that was _so familiar_ it made Richie feel like his heart was going to explode. “What brings me here, on the side of the I-95?”

God, Richie didn’t know it was possible to forget that you were missing someone until they were suddenly right in front of you, to not realize that the gnawing sort of ache he’d carried around with him was the lack of Eddie Kaspbrak until he was standing there on the gravelly shoulder, feeling that ache so intensely he wanted to scream or laugh or cry just to free himself of some of that pressure.

“Haven’t you heard,” said Richie, spreading his arms around, “it’s the most happening spot this side of Derry?” It was a bad joke, and Richie could tell that Eddie thought so too by the strained sort of smile across his lips.

“God, you didn’t change,” Eddie said, more to himself than anything.

“What do you mean? I got taller.”

Richie didn’t know what the look was on Eddie’s face as he took Richie in, and he didn’t like this new not-knowing.

So he panicked and said, “Looks like you didn’t quite get the memo there, Kaspbrak. Would they even let you on Space Mountain?” He held his hand about chest high, held his breath as Eddie just stared and stared and stared at him. He felt that distance again, but this time it wasn’t just physical, it was the weight of a decade. “Fuck,” Richie said, suddenly embarrassed. He ran his fingers through his hair. “Sorry, man, just—“

“Don’t be an idiot. I’d never go to Disneyland and you know this.” They looked at each other for a second, and Eddie looked almost surprised at himself for saying anything, and Richie’s head spun because, hey, what the fuck. Eddie cleared his throat and advanced on the smoking Chevrolet. He rolled the sleeves of his shirt up his arms, and Richie could see that they were no longer thin and noodly, but roped with muscle, freckled like the rest of him. “So, what happened?”

Richie shrugged, shoved his hands in his pockets just to give them something to do. “Dunno. Just, happened.”

Eddie’s brows furrowed further, but he wasn’t angry, wasn’t worried. It was the same look he’d get when they were kids, and he was trying to find a new path through the Barrens. When he was trying to get the hang of long-division. When he was fixing up Bill’s stupidly massive bike Silver, tiny hands tightening up the rusty old chain with ease. Richie could have sworn he caught Eddie looking at him like that too, sometimes, out of the corner of his eye, like a puzzle he was trying to solve all inside his head.

Eddie darted back to his own car, and for a numb second Richie thought that he was just about to leave him here, that the height joke had been the first and the last straw—but Eddie just popped the trunk, brought out a rag stained with black smudges. He used this rag to lift the hood, to swipe some of the smoke away. Richie watched Eddie’s eyes move around the inner workings of his old pickup, narrowed and precise, and he felt like he was thirteen again. All itchy and squirmy and too small on the inside. He found a spare coin in his pocket and danced it between his fingertips.

“So,” Eddie said, more to Richie’s car than to Richie himself. “Looks like your engine overheated. Did you notice anything with the temperature gauge?”

“The temperature gauge?” Richie repeated. Eddie eyes flicked up at him in consternation, faded by the thin veil of smoke between them. Framed like that, backlit by the setting sun and hazed all over by the final dying huffs of Richie’s engine, it was hard to imagine that Eddie wasn’t just a character in a dream.

“Yeah, the thermometer on your dash?”

“Oh. So you’re saying that’s _not_ supposed to tell me if it’s hot _outside_.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Eddie said, once more to Richie’s car. “Who even let you get behind the wheel?”

“The great state of Maine, baby,” said Richie, flashing a toothy smile.

“Okay, what about coolant.”

“Cool-what?”

“Tell me that you’re fucking kidding me, Richie.”

“Usually am, man, but unfortunately, not this time. What the fuck is coolant?”

Eddie didn’t deign to give him a response, instead his mouth screwed up in a little line and his brow wrinkled and his expression was _so exasperated_ and _so familiar_ and Richie felt like his heart might give out if he looked at Eddie too long. Because when he looked, he saw both versions—the chirpy thirteen year old who gave so much better than he got; this new, taller version, deep-voiced, with broad, sure hands, with brand-new cheekbones and a scowl that he wore like a smile.

Eddie poked around inside of the hood of the car, using the rag as a layer of protection between his skin and the hot metal. He kept muttering to himself, a conversation between him and the engine that Richie wasn’t privy to, and he kicked at the gravel to give his body something to do while he waited.

“Yeah,” Eddie said, on a nod, answering a question Richie hadn’t asked. “Looks like your radiator hose is leaking. See?” He pointed at something beneath the hood, but Richie kept his eyes trained on Eddie’s new, older

(handsome)

face. Eddie had a small, triumphant smile. He wiped his grease-smudged fingers on the rag.

“Fuck, is that…?”

Eddie shook his head. “Super easy.” He closed the hood, gave Richie a look. “C’mon, I can drive us back into town. We’ll get a tow.”

Richie didn’t need to be asked twice, and he tried not to think about how fucking weird this day had been as he ducked into the passenger seat of Eddie’s Toyota. The Velvet Underground played from Eddie’s stereo as the car came to life, and Richie shot Eddie an impressed glance.

He tried not to think about being kids, swinging together in a hammock on a lazy afternoon. _Check them out, Eds,_ Richie had said, wielding a cassette of the Loaded album in the air. _You’ll like this, I promise_.

Apparently he had.

Lou Reed’s crooning filled the silence between them, but the quiet was still a heavy, unwieldy thing. He wasn’t used to it, not when it came to him and Eddie. And maybe the problem was that he wasn’t used to Eddie at all—not this version, not this nearly grown man with a straight, sharp line of a nose and whose hair curled a little onto his forehead in the way it never had in the 80s. It was a strange feeling. Sitting beside your childhood best friend. Sitting beside a stranger.

They made it through “I Found a Reason” and were making progress on”Train Round the Bend” when Richie broke the silence first. “So, cars?” Cars. Jesus Christ.

“Yeah, cars. I work on them now.”

“No shit?”

Eddie spoke around a chuckle, “No shit.”

“And how does, uh…”

“How does what?”

“How does your…you know…?”

“Are you looking for the word mother, Rich? Because from what I remember you couldn’t fucking shut up about her when we were kids.”

“I was going to say ‘my fetching paramour,’ but you’re right, mother’s more appropriate. What does your, uh, mother think?”

Richie saw a muscle twitch in Eddie’s jaw. The Eddie in his memories hadn’t had a jaw like that. It was all so much to take in. “She’s fine with it.”

“Really?” Richie couldn’t hide his incredulity. “Aren’t cars dangerous and shit? You know. Explosions. Grease.”

“I told you,” Eddie said. Barely any warmth at all. “She’s fine with it.”

“Oh. Cool. Cool beans, then.”

Silence settled over them again, “Oh Sweet Nuthin’” marking the time. Richie hadn’t broken down too far out of the city limits, and soon enough his hometown unfolded before them. He hadn’t see it in ten years, and yet it still felt more familiar to him than Castle Rock ever had. He could see the verdant slash of the Barrens in the distance, thought of the boy—the man—beside him, grinning and dappled in sunlight. They’d been free then. Richie wondered if that was the last time he’d been truly happy, and then that thought was too depressing to follow, so he cleared his throat and watched Derry go by.

Sweeney’s Auto was somewhat on the outskirts of the town proper, an old school repair shop from the 40s or 50s, and little had changed, judging by Mr. Sweeney’s arthritic hands poking out from his jumpsuit as Eddie walked in, by the papery crinkles around his eyes. Eddie used the phone to dispatch a tow truck, got Richie a Dixie cup of water from the cooler, talked shop with Mr. Sweeney to pass the time. Richie didn’t know enough about cars to contribute to the ongoing conversation about Mrs. Hoolin’s carborator, and so he just settled into the cracked plastic seat of the auto shop’s lobby and watched Eddie move.

His mannerisms were the same, just as pronounced even now, on his sharpening face. It made Richie feel a little crazy, like he was a time traveler who got things just a little wrong and found himself trapped between two years, between 1989 and 1999, thirteen and twenty-three at once. He looked at Eddie, he took him in, and he felt an inexplicable sadness rush over him like a rogue wave. Because Eddie was still here. Eddie Kaspbrak, the boy that had been told all his life that he was too fragile for the rest of the world, too weak to be a kid, too sickly to have a life independent from the one that his mother had carved out and jammed him into even when he didn’t fit. Eddie Kaspbrak, who would spend those sticky summer days sharing Richie’s ice cream and invading his personal space and kicking and frowning and swearing and laughing, but dreaming, most of all. Dreaming like Richie did of a life outside of this place.

Derry didn’t deserve Eddie. And more importantly, Eddie deserved a world outside of this stale small town.

He hadn’t realized how obviously he’d been staring until Eddie caught his eyes, a self conscious look on his face.

Fuck.

Mr. Sweeney excused himself, told Richie the tow should take only another ten minutes or so. Richie just nodded, ignored the weird disconnect he felt with the rest of his body, the instinctive chant of his brain _Eddie’s here Eddie’s here Eddie’s here_ —demanding Eddie’s attention just like it had when they were kids.

He busied himself with a People magazine from June of 1998. He knew from context clues that he was reading an old article about Matt Lauer’s engagement, but he didn’t see the text, he only saw _Eddie’s here Eddie’s here Eddie’s here Eddie’s here_. He turned the pages anyway, to make it look like he was actually reading.

“You’re different.”

“Huh?” Richie’s head snapped up from the tabloid, a little too fast, a little too eager, a dog who’d just heard its owner’s voice and was desperate for attention. “Oh, uh. I thought you said I wasn't. Back at my car.”

Eddie’s eyes narrowed, thoughtful. Richie felt naked under that gaze. “You are though. A little. Quieter.”

“Oh,” said Richie, holding his stare for a heartbeat too long. “Hotter though, right?”

Eddie exhaled, an almost chuckle, and he rolled his new grown-up eyes in a way that clenched Richie’s chest. He turned his attention back to the magazine, because if he looked too long at that face, if he thought too much about those eyes, then he’d think of other things, of things he’d done in the dark, things he’d done with men with eyes like that, chasing a ghost he hadn’t realized he’d been searching for. Richie felt a little sick.

“So, were you coming back to Derry?” There was curiosity in Eddie’s voice, but also something that sounded like hope. Was he coming back to Derry? _Were you coming back to me?_

Richie was such a piece of shit. Eddie’d been his best friend in the world, as much a part of him as any bone or vein, they’d grown up and around each other like trees, twining together. And when he’d moved, he hadn’t fought for that. Hadn’t fought for him. Had let himself be swept up in a newer, shittier town and had let himself rot away inside of it. Had Eddie thought of him, Richie wondered? Long after the last call came?

“Through Derry, actually.”

“Oh. Still in Castle Rock?”

“Still in Derry?”

They shared a sad half smile between them. Still here, it said. Still stuck.

“I’m running away,” said Richie.

Eddie’s eyes shot up to meet his, but he kept his voice indifferent. “Can you call it running away if you’re a grown-up?”

“I’ve never been a grown-up.”

“Fair enough,” Eddie said, “but I’ve also only known you as a kid, so.”

Eddie hadn’t said it to be cruel, but Richie wanted to cry anyway. He read Matt Lauer’s name over and over again, in its glossy title font. “Well either way, I’m running away.” He thought of that morning, of walking out mid-shift, throwing everything he could in the back of his truck. Thought of calling his mother from a gas station payphone— _Love you Moms, love you Pops, I’ll call you once I’m there_ , even though he had no clue where There was. “I can’t be ‘still in Castle Rock’ anymore.”

Eddie opened his mouth to say something, but then the tow truck returned, and Richie crushed the Dixie cup in his hand and tried to shoot it into the wastebasket across the lobby. He missed.

Eddie was right, about the repair being simple. Richie tried and failed to not watch his as he replaced the hose, tried not to concentrate on the stripe of grease that painted across the ridge of his cheekbone, tried not to imagine brushing it off with his own thumb. Eddie was a grown-up now. Eddie had a job he was really fucking good at, a job he liked. Eddie was _here_. Richie still wasn’t entirely sure that he hadn’t been taken out by some freak accident on the side of the road and this wasn’t all some bizarre coma-dream.

Eddie was _here_.

He looked particularly thoughtful as he peered into the hood of his car, running his bottom lip through his teeth over and over and over, another nervous habit, a relic from childhood.

Eddie fixed his car as Richie stared over the pages of People, and then he straightened with a sigh, wiping his palms on the legs of his jumpsuit.

“All set?” asked Richie. Eddie just nodded and put the hood down. His job was over, but that puzzled look was still all over his face, he was still working something through in his head. “So, uh.” Richie reached for his wallet. “How much do I owe you?”

“Take me.” Eddie wasn’t looking at him. Richie felt a little breathless.

 _Take me_.

His brain was still wrapping itself around accepting the concept that the dark-eyed man he was having a conversation with was Eddie Kaspbrak, and this new kernel of information was just sending him into overload. _Take me_. Jesus Christ.

“Uh,” Richie laughed nervously, “is this the part in the script where I pretend I forgot my wallet and you tear my clothes off?”

Eddie’s face flushed an intense scarlet, and the set of his jaw was almost furious as he dragged his eyes up to Richie’s face. There was a fire there, almost manic. “Take me with you.”

“I…” Richie lost his way through that sentence. He licked his lips. “I don’t even know where I’m going, Eddie.”

“Even better.”

“I…” said Richie, hopelessly, mouth opening and closing as he tried to find something to say.

“Please,” said Eddie, and the word was so simple and striking that Richie felt like he had to sit down. Please was all it took. Eddie could ask him to kill a man, could look at him with that fierce edge in his brown eyes and murmur the word _please_ , and Richie would just nod and ask _gun or knife_? “Please,” Eddie repeated, and the word was a bullet to the chest. Richie was bleeding out and he didn’t mind. “I can’t be ‘still in Derry’ anymore.”

Eddie stared at him, Richie felt himself fall into those eyes. He realized that Eddie was waiting for an answer, realized he hadn’t given one yet. “Sure,” he said, and it didn’t feel like a big enough word for all of this. “Sure, Eddie. Anything.”

A smile broke across Eddie’s face, the first big one that Richie’d seen in a decade, and suddenly they were biking down Kansas Street again, caught on the cusp of growing up, giddy and sun-drunk.

Two hours later, Richie was back on the I-95. The The still played on his tape— _this is the day your life will surely change_ , they told him.

Derry fell away in the rearview, and then the whole of Penobscot county, a blur of violent orange and red, and Richie turned up the volume of the stereo and said, “So, where to, Eds?”

“Don’t call me that,” came Eddie’s instinctual response from where he sat in the passenger seat, a brief backslide into childhood, and then he said, “Fucking anywhere. Anywhere at all.”

Anywhere sounded like a great place to be.

 _He’s too fast for us_ , his parents used to say, and as Richie eased down the highway he thought, maybe I’m just fast enough.


	2. portsmouth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> growing pains.

When Richie was eleven years old, he overheard Greta Keene talking to Eddie Corcoran about the sleep-away camp that her dad was sending her to over the summer, and Richie hatched a plan.

That weekend, he mowed the lawn of every neighbor on the street—he’d mowed Mrs. Caruso’s twice, because she was like a grown-up lady version of Stan, and he thought he might get a better tip if he proved he was thorough. He’d managed to squeeze an extra quarter out of the old broad, which wasn’t much, but Richie was eleven and his concept of money was limited at best, and a quarter was equal to one game at the arcade by the Aladdin and so it seemed significant enough to save.

At dinner, he’d dug his little cache of coins and wadded up bills from his pockets and dumped it ceremoniously in front of his dad’s plate of roast chicken. Eight dollars and sixty-seven cents. He had no idea how much sleep-away camp cost, but figured that was a decent deposit.

Went and Mags smiled over their food at each other, and gave him a hard time for the rest of the meal, but said yes just like Richie knew they would. His dad made more money that Greta’s, so it couldn’t come down to an expense thing, and even at eleven Richie knew without knowing why that his parents would do just fine if he wasn’t in the house. They weren’t like Eddie’s mom, checking his room fifteen times a night just to be sure that he hadn’t slipped out of his window, or even like Ben’s and Mike’s and Stan’s families, who missed them the normal amount and always greeted them with warm hugs and affectionate head-pats and plenty of verbal “I love you”s.

The Toziers didn’t work like that, this Richie knew even then.

So they said yes, without a second thought.

The camp was up in Acadia National Park, right on a lake, and looked just like the brochures they’d gotten in the mail after he was enrolled. Little cabins painted sunny colors, arranged in a half-circle on the shore. An amphitheater surrounded by trees, hewn logs for seats. His first day was June 15, and he would be gone all through June and July— and in some ways Richie thought that he’d be a little like his parents, able to operate outside of his regular orbit without feeling anything weird about it, able to leave the people he loved for a while and be absolutely alright.

He was absolutely alright for the first week.

Greta was there and she sucked, but there were also about seventy-four other kids, and the reason that Richie’d been so drawn to go had been because it was a performing camp. Every day, in between canoeing on the crystalline lake just outside their cabins and taking archery lessons in a copse of trees behind the mess hall, he and his fellow beacons of Maine youth put on skits at the camp’s amphitheater. Some of the kids preferred dancing, some of the kids were musical, but Richie was funny, and he had a mouth that never stopped, and that summer was the first time he’d ever learned the word “improv” and been introduced to the idea that he could stand on stages like this for the rest of his life, running his unstoppable mouth, making people laugh for the rest of forever.

On his first Saturday, Richie sat by the phone in the game cabin and fielded five calls in a row—way more than Greta Keene. After saying goodbye to Bev in about a dozen different Voices he dialed up the sixth number, leaned against the wooden walls, and waited. And waited. And waited.

He dialed the number again, just to be sure. Eddie was probably out in the backyard, or he hadn’t heard the phone ring, or maybe he was still biking over from Bill’s or Mike’s or Ben’s. Richie had a sudden, painful image of Eddie, sun-dappled and smiling, and Richie ached inside because he hadn’t been the reason Eddie smiled that day. He didn’t know what shirt he was wearing. Richie hadn’t heard Eddie’s voice in a week and suddenly he was afraid he’d forget the sound, and the laughter of the campers around him sounded uglier, and the brilliant sun that shot through the pine trees outside seemed too hot, and everything about him felt gross and weird and wrong.

Eddie never called him during those six weeks, and never sent him a letter like the other Losers, and that ache just grew and grew.

The longest they’d been apart since they met had been the week and a half that Richie spent up in Quebec with his mom’s side of the family every other year at Christmastime, but even then they talked on the phone all the time, and Richie knew at eleven that he was tangled so helplessly up in Eddie, that they were linked in ways he didn’t understand and maybe never could, that Richie without Eddie felt like a joke without a punchline.

Richie came home on July 31st, and his parents had chattered the entire drive back down to Derry, asking him questions about the camp, and the lake, and how good he’d gotten with a bow and arrow, and how they thought this place could be a great way for him to expand out of Derry, how he could go back next year, maybe even become a counselor when he was old enough. He spent the entire drive looking out the window at the station-wagon, convinced that Eddie hated his guts.

When they turned the corner onto their street it was late afternoon, and Eddie Kaspbrak was sitting on their stoop, bike discarded on the lawn, a bundle of papers tied together with twine sitting on his lap.

He was frowning, his big wide eyes round and hurt, and he shoved at Richie’s shoulder once he got close enough.

“Don’t do that again,” Eddie had commanded, “don’t go where I can’t go. Pinky swear?”

“Pinky swear,” Richie agreed automatically, because he couldn’t have said it better himself.

And then Eddie had pulled him into a crushing hug, and handed him the papers. “She wouldn’t let me.”

They were letters, twelve in all, two for each week that Richie was gone, addressed and postmarked but never sent. Eddie told Richie later that his mother had assured him she’d sent them, but he’d found them stockpiled away in her dresser drawer. She’d let him spend almost that whole summer thinking that Richie didn’t want to talk to him anymore.

Richie felt himself getting watery, but Eddie didn’t say anything about the tears in his eyes, and Richie’s mom called out through the open window to invite Eddie to stay for dinner, and a dinner invitation turned into a sleepover, and they were back to joking around so quickly that Richie thought nothing could ever pull them apart forever.

Like no matter what happened, they were Richie-and-Eddie, one word.

You couldn’t split them up.

All this to say—Richie thought things would stay the same forever, stupid even at twenty-three.

He thought that even after a decade, even after Richie broke the only solemn promise he’d ever made— _don’t go where I can’t go—_ somehow things would bounce back. There’d be an instant of hurt, that first initial shove, and then they’d fall back into place.

Richie thought that by the time they got out of Maine, at least, it’d be back to normal.

It wasn’t.

They’d been in the car for hours and had hardly said more than two words to each other beyond Richie constantly asking if his music was okay with Eddie and occasionally pulling into a rest stop with a single grunt of “bathroom.” His skin crawled, he felt like he was burning under the weight of being in close quarters with a boy he’d once known everything about. Questions seared against his tongue— _why are you running? Are you running from her? Why me? Do you feel this weirdness too? Am I making all this up? What do you want to do when we get wherever the fuck we’re going? Are you going to leave me? Are we going to say goodbye again? Did ‘take me’ mean stay with me, or did it mean, ‘can I hitch a ride’? Why aren’t you saying anything? Do you hate me? Did you miss me? Do you still want to be a race car driver when you grow up? What is it that you dream about?_

Richie remembered a time that he could count Eddie’s dreams the way they counted stars through his bedroom window. When he could take one look at Eddie and his every thought was open to him, he never had to second-guess, he never had to feel unsure. That was then, though. Now, Eddie, with his sharpening face and his grease-smeared fingers, was a mystery.A stranger where once he’d been Richie’s everything. And fuck, if that didn’t sting a little.

Richie was exhausted by the time they got to Portland—they hadn’t made it out of Derry until about five, and now it was nearing seven-thirty and the sky was darkening and all Richie wanted was a cheeseburger. But he didn’t have to say anything aloud to know that Eddie would feel the same—they couldn’t rest until they were out of Maine. They had to cross the border before they stopped. They had to have that little victory. 

It was only an hour from Portland to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a little seaside town that sat quite literally along the line between the states. Maybe their whole “no rest until we’re out of Maine” rule was taken too literally, but they’d gotten out regardless. Crossed the metaphorical goalposts. Richie pulled up at the first gas station he saw, so close to the division between states he could spit at the border.

“I’m gonna go use the phone,” Richie mumbled, and was surprised when Eddie got out of the car, too, wandered behind him to the payphone. Eddie’s hands were dug into his pockets, and that look had never left his face—the look with the furrowed brows, the searching eyes, working through a problem that might have just been Richie.

Richie tried not to think about that too much and slipped a coin into the payphone slot, dialed up the number that used to be his own. Fuck. Weird feeling. His dad picked up on the third ring.

“Hey, Pops? Yeah, it’s Rich.”

“ _Hiya, son. How’s the drive_?” Richie could hear the weary smile in his father’s voice. It was a Tuesday, Went would have come home smelling like fluoride toothpaste, tired after a long day of maneuvering around the mouths of squirmy elementary kids and filling their cavities. He talked to Richie like this was a vacation, a quick jaunt down to Portland or Augusta for the day, maybe out to Bar Harbor to spend some time with the sea. He talked to Richie like he hadn’t left in a flurry that morning, with no intention of ever coming back in a way that meant something permanent.

Richie wanted it to hurt. But it was Went. It was how it always was—asking him how he was, bulldozing right over the answer Richie gave if it was anything only than the expected, _perfectly fine, Pops._

 _How’s the drive?_ Went said, and didn’t ask when Richie would be coming back home because he knew that the answer Richie would give was _never_.

“Not too bad, not too bad at all.”

“ _Traffic_?”

“Nah, roads are quiet. I’m in New Hampshire now.”

“ _Portsmouth_?”

“Yeah, actually. It’s nice.”

“ _Mmmm_.” There was a pause as both Tozier men searched for something to say, rooting through their conversation pockets for spare change, coming up with nothing but lint and a stick of gum. “ _Hey, son, here’s your mother. She’s excited to hear from you._ ”

“Alright.”

“ _Love you, Richie_.”

“Yeah Pops, love you too.” He meant it, even though it hurt in a way he didn’t understand.

There was a shuffling, and he could hear his mother’s voice, soft and nasal, accent catching on certain words even after years of living in Maine. “ _Richie?_ ”

“Hey, Mags,” Richie said in his father’s Voice, waited to hear the laugh. It came, a low tinkle, polite and practiced. “I’m in New Hampshire.”

“ _Portsmouth_?” She asked.

“Yeah, Portsmouth. Feels good to get out of Maine.”

“ _We’ll miss you,_ ” said his mother, and Richie turned over the words in his mind. _We’ll miss you_. Someday. Not yet. Maybe soon, maybe not, but missing you is something we’ll get around to doing in the future.

He had the wild, juvenile urge to confide in her, to make the fact that he was standing in New Hampshire with a grown-up Eddie Kaspbrak all the more real because someone besides himself would know it.

“Ma, écoute,” Richie said, for the rest of the conversation slipping into the québécois French that his mother naturally spoke—she’d grown up across the US-Canadian border in Sherbrooke, and twice a year Richie’d sit through a long weekend with his francophone family members. It always made her happier when he spoke her favorite language, sometimes when he could tell she was feeling a million miles away he’d switch from English just to get a weary smile. But that wasn’t the reason this time. He was all too aware of the other boy, the boy who was just close enough to be in earshot. “Tu devineras jamais quoi,” he said: _you’ll never guess what._

“ _What_?” She responded, in French.

Richie continued in québécois. Prying ears, and all that. “I ran into someone on my way here. Someone you know.”

“ _Who? Is this one of your little jokes, Richie?_ ”

“Non, Ma, listen, think about Derry. He was my best friend.” Richie paused. Eddie Kaspbrak sounded the same in all languages. “Little. Red shorts. You know.”

“ _Oh,_ Eddie _? Little Eddie Kaspbrak? Your old chum_?”

Richie chuckled into the phone, tried not to let himself get too flustered. His old chum. “Still little.”

“ _Well Richie, good for you. You always were so close. Tell him we say hello, won’t you_?” Richie would not, but he said yes anyway.

“I’ll uh, I’ll let you guys go for now. Bon nuit, Ma. Je t’aime.”

“ _Love you, Richie_.”

“All right, bye,” he said, fully back into English now, and hung up the phone. He cleared his throat, looked at Eddie, who was leaning against the wall and toeing at a crack in the pavement. “Don’t you know what they say about that, Eds?”

“What do they say, Rich?”

“Step on a crack, break your mom’s back.”

Eddie pressed down on it, with both feet.

“Okay, uh. Do you need to use the phone?”

Eddie shook his head. He waited for him to say something, for Eddie to untangle that puzzled look on his face and say whatever it was he was so clearly holding onto, what he’d been holding onto since they left Penobscot county, but nothing came. Richie didn’t know how to exist around this new Eddie, and he kept crossing and then uncrossing his arms.

“Let’s just find a hotel,” said Eddie after a moment.

“Sure thing.”

“And Rich?” Eddie asked as they were heading back to the truck. Richie looked over at him. “I am not still _little_. I’m average fucking height. Don’t tell people I’m still little.”

Richie’s brain took a few seconds to process. “Still…? You got that? I was speaking French, dude.” He stopped walking, looked at Eddie with poorly masked surprise. “You remember?”

Eddie didn’t look right at him, looked at a spot above his shoulder instead. He shrugged. “I’m a little rusty. Hard to keep it up when there’s no one around to speak it with.” And then Eddie slid into the passenger seat of the cab, and Richie stood struck for a second, caught in the darkening light, feeling cracked wide open.

—

The inn that Eddie found for them was just a few blocks from the sea, and Richie woke the next morning to the squawks of gulls and the salty smell of ocean air wafting through his open window. His first day of freedom. His first day out of Maine, his first day on his own.

Or, not.

His first day on his own, with Eddie in the passenger seat.

Fucking _Eddie_ —his head swam every time he tried to wrap it around the concept. Eddie. It was like his brain had latched onto the name, ran it on loop just in case Richie forgot it, a constant, steady hum of _eddie eddie eddie eddie eddie_ the undercurrent of his every thought.

He stretched and thought about Eddie, looked out the window at the harbor and thought about Eddie, took a quick shower and tried very much to not think about Eddie.

His hand still burned when water hit it, a smooth red rise of skin that was beginning to pucker at the edges. Looking at it just made him think of Eddie too. Jesus.

He dragged a towel through his dripping hair, put on the first shirt+button up combo he could find in his bag, and opened the door to go and knock on Eddie’s, to bully him into celebrating their first day as grown-up runaways with an extremely unhealthy breakfast at the greasiest spoon they could find. But Eddie was already there, in the hallway, fist raised like he had just been about to knock against the door before Richie swung it wide open. It stayed suspended there in the air for a moment, while he and Richie looked at each other with more surprise than was probably called for.

“Mornin’,” said Richie.

“You slept late,” said Eddie.

“Late? Are we on a schedule?”

“I mean, maybe we should be. More distance covered, and all of that.”

“We don’t even know where we’re going.”

“I went for a run and bought us a map.” Eddie hoisted a logoless plastic bag in the air between them. Richie’s brain ran the word “us” on repeat.

“Breakfast?” Richie proposed.

“Breakfast.”

They found a café by the boardwalk, small and old-looking, with cracked red-leather booths and lovers’ initials carved into the wooden tabletops. Richie tried not to look too long at them, tried not to notice the letters that reminded him of names twined together on the Kissing Bridge back home. No, not home. Derry wasn’t home anymore. Neither was Castle Rock.

Home was wherever the fuck Richie wanted it to be.

So now he just had to figure that part out.

Eddie had spread the map out between their plates of pancakes, tracing routes along the printed lines with the cap of a pen he’d stolen from the inn. He said he’d bought a map, back at the inn, but really he’d bought several. There was a big one of the U.S.—just in case they forgot what it looked like, Richie guessed—and then there was a more specific one that showed New England. Richie had the sneaking suspicion that that plastic bag was filled with more.

Eddie was saying something about traffic patterns, and if it would even be worth it to drive down the coast and see the big cities or if they should just book it straight for the Midwest, and he glanced at Richie expectantly, those big brown eyes flashing at him, asking for input. Richie knew that he should say something relevant to the conversation, but instead his mouth opened and he said, “You run now?” Shit.

Eddie blinked at him, and then those big eyes narrowed. “Uh, yeah. Since high school, actually.”

Richie sat with that, mouthed the words, “since high school,” soundlessly. It was hard for him to imagine it, to see Eddie in a time of his life where he hadn’t known Richie. They’d been together all of their lives until they hadn’t, and then they’d fallen right back into each other and it was easier for Richie to just pretend like Eddie had snapped out of existence for a decade, only to rematerialize behind the wheel of a sensible Toyota, right on time to save Richie’s stupid ass from the side of the highway.

He knew it made him a shitty person, to hate the thought of Eddie living a life separate from the one they’d made together ever since they were kids—but he didn't fucking care.

And thinking about him laughing and talking and sharing his secrets with anyone other than Richie during those ten long years hurt him in ways he didn’t really understand, so he knew he shouldn’t press the matter. But he did anyway.

“You ran in high school?”

“Track.” Eddie wasn’t looking at him, was playing with the pen. “Varsity.”

Richie let out a low whistle. “Shit, Kaspbrak.” He remembered them being kids, chasing their laughter through the Barrens on sunny summer days, and he remembered the wild gleam Eddie got in his eyes once he really got going. He was the fastest little fucker of them all, even Mike, and when he ran it was like every weight was lifted off of his shoulders, like suddenly he was flying instead, like he was completely unstoppable, completely unbreakable, completely free.

The image of Eddie, breathless, a little dirty, standing small in his mother’s stormy shadow crossed through his mind. He could see the way Eddie shrunk whenever he was around her, like all the weight that he’d shaken off returned in force and broke him down, stooped him over.

Fuck Sonia Kaspbrak.

Fuck.

Her.

He knew it was a bad idea to bring it up.

But he brought it up.

“Your mom was okay with that?’

“I can fucking do things without my mom’s fucking permission,” Eddie said, all venom, nothing gentle. Richie recoiled, even though he should have known better. Even if he knew this was coming. He tried to fit together the pieces of Eddie in his mind—the Eddie he’d known who would shake and cry and gasp for his inhaler and bark out a squeaky “Yes, Mommy,” whenever she gave him a sharp look; and the Eddie across the table from him, the Eddie who ran track and fixed cars and got grease smeared above the freckles on his cheeks, with a sharp jaw and a sharp nose and a sharp sort of sadness in his eyes.

And maybe he was trying to summon the shove. The one brief pinch of pain, the _don’t do that again_ that came before the hugs and the pinky promises and the laughter and the normalcy. The snap of the rubber band that would push them together again, that would melt away the weight of ten years that sat between them uncomfortably, so tangible he could almost touch it.

Eddie’s eyes burned into his, like he was daring Richie to spin this into a dumb joke, but instead Richie just pointed his fork at a mound of syrupy blueberry pancake on Eddie’s plate and asked, “Are you gonna eat that?”

—

They were paying for the bill when Eddie finally noticed the little blister on Richie’s thumb, and it was almost like the shove Richie’d been looking for. His eyebrows slammed together and his mouth pressed into a thin line and those wide eyes ran over the burn, assessing the damage.

“How did that happen?”

“Car.”

“What the fuck?”

“I didn’t know that the inside of the car would be hot when I popped the hood. Burned my hand.”

“You didn’t think that your _overheating fucking engine_ would be hot.” He made a little chopping motion through the air and then pinched the bridge of his nose in exasperation. It was so familiar. Richie’s heart almost ached.“Oh my fucking God how have you survived this long.”

Richie tried to ignore the weird way that his stomach swooped. This was good. This was Eddie seeing an extremely minor problem and going full DEFCON 1 about it, just like he always used to. Maybe not everything had to change. Maybe Eddie could run track and fix cars and grow up to look like _that_ , but he still had this leftover quirk from 1989. One thing he hadn’t outgrown.

Eddie had first aid stuff back at the inn—because of course he did—and he lectured Richie the entire way there. Richie couldn’t help but smile, felt his face break into a wide, stupid grin, which only made things infinitely better because Eddie immediately glared at him and snapped, “What the fuck do you think is so funny, asshole?” And they might as well have been thirteen again. Richie fought the urge to give him a noogie.

He trailed after Eddie into his room, looked over it to find the traces of him. The room was identical to his, kind of small, old-fashioned wallpaper, weighty blue curtains framing the wide window. But there was Eddie’s duffel, propped up on one of those luggage stands hotels always provided but Richie never used.

Eddie went over to the closet and rifled through a second, smaller bag that was stashed in there. He heard the rattle of pill bottles, thought of Sonia Kaspbrak and immediately wished he hadn’t. “Still toting around the Fanny Pack Pharmacy, eh Eds?”

“Don’t call me that,” Eddie said, with no bite. “Sit down.”

Richie did.

“Lemme see your hand.”

Richie held it out to him. “It’s seriously not a big deal, dude. Just a little blister.”

Eddie ignored him. He had a bottle of lotion in his hand, aloe something, and slowly squeezed a dollop onto the back of his left hand. He sat down beside Richie, the bed bouncing slightly beneath them, and dipped his fingers into the lotion.

“I can do that myself, you know,” protested Richie, weakly.

“Yeah but I can do it better.”

Eddie ran his fingers lightly, so fucking lightly, over the angry patch of red. The contact stung a little, brought back that slight feeling of burning, and Richie forced himself to focus on that instead of the fact that this was the first time he and Eddie had touched since they were thirteen and his mind didn’t know how to process that information in a way that wasn’t just one giant fireworks display of _Eddie!_

The lotion felt cool, soothed the skin beneath Eddie’s careful fingers.

“Thanks,” Richie said.

Eddie looked up at him, the freckles across his nose startlingly visible from this close, and just said, “Yeah.”

Suddenly his fingers no longer moved across Richie’s hand, and Richie wanted them back more than anything, and very quickly decided that that was a rabbithole of thought he could never allow himself to fall down because what the fuck, this was _Eddie_ , and not the one that had wrestled with him in the hammock and held his hand during horror movies but a newer model, one he didn’t know so well. Fuck.

Eddie got out a strip of gauze, which again, Richie thought was unnecessary.

“You going to have to amputate too, Dr. K?”

Eddie shot him a withering look. “Yeah, your dick.”

They looked at each other, startled for a moment by the autopilot response, and then Richie burst into wild laughter. “Fucking _yes_ , Eds Gets Off a Good One!” He grinned. “Knew you’re still the same.”

Eddie’s own smile faltered. He wound up Richie’s hand with a small strip of the gauze. His eyes had gone heavy again, that furrow had popped back up between his brows, he had the look from yesterday back on his face and Richie couldn’t stand it because once upon a time he’d have been able to read that expression, he’d be able to take one look at Eddie’s eyes and understand everything he meant, they’d be able to speak without speaking aloud, just fitting together, making sense, none of this awkward, uneasy bullshit.

“What.” There was an edge to his voice that he didn’t mean to put there, and Eddie glared a little up at him.

“What do you mean, ‘what?’”

“There’s obviously something you’ve been wanting to say so. Say it. Get it off your fucking chest, man.”

Eddie set his mouth in a thin line. They were too close to be having this conversation. Richie could still count his freckles. But he couldn’t move, he was pinned in place.

“You want me to be the same, but I’m fucking not.”

“What are you—“

“You keep looking at me and I can tell you’re looking for—for who I used to be, and I can fucking tell that you hope I’ve stayed the same but I didn’t. I changed and you’re a big fucking part of the reason why so just—I don’t know, just stop.”

“Stop looking at you?”

“Stop being such a fucking dick right now,” Eddie said, his nostrils flared. “You left Derry. I never did. You fucking left and that fucking changed things so stop looking so _fucking_ surprised.”

He saw Eddie, small in the middle of the road, he saw himself crying. “Are you fucking serious right now? I was _thirteen_ I didn’t have a choice—“

Eddie rubbed at his jaw, worked at his mouth, threw the supplies in his first aid bag and shoved it on top of the duffel. “Fucking forget it, I’m taking a walk.”

Richie wanted to fight, wanted to yell, wanted to defend himself even though he knew what Eddie meant. _You left and never came back_. The never-coming-back part was the problem.

But Eddie grabbed his windbreaker from where he’d folded it over a chair and shoved past Richie into the hallway. “You’d better pack. We should leave soon if we want to get out of fucking New Hampshire before dark.”

And then Richie was alone. He screamed into Eddie’s pillow and didn’t know why.

It smelled like him.

Richie tried not to notice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fair warning—this fic is gonna be a lil slow burn-y. i really want to explore the dynamic of two people who meant the world to each other not having spoken for a decade and then suddenly they're spending every moment together, so there's going to be a bit of awkward. 
> 
> inspo for french-canadian richie comes from mello's awesome twitter au, scream team! read it if you haven't, it's great!
> 
> as always follow me on twitter @sloppybxtchh and check out the reddie social media au i co-author at @ontherocks_au !
> 
> please comment your thoughts, i really genuinely love to read them <3

**Author's Note:**

> thank you so much for reading, and please leave me a comment with your thoughts! they truly make my day and I'd love you forever. 
> 
> follow me at @sloppybxtchh on twitter for more clown movie nonsense


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